


home is where you are

by orphan_account



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, mentions of abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-05
Packaged: 2018-03-21 09:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3686910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which it's almost scary,<br/>how much hinata cares about his partner,<br/>and needs him to be okay.</p><blockquote>
  <p>"he looks up to offer kageyama a silvery, astral smile, laced with the very essence of bright starshine."</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	home is where you are

**Author's Note:**

> important ;; don't read this if you're easily triggered! thank you ^^  
> this was quite difficult to write so i hope it's okay!
> 
> {lowercase completely intended + my tumblr is jetpackcrows!}

**i.**

screaming.

screaming is what chokes kageyama awake when it's two in the morning, and there is blackness pooling all around him like crepuscular ink, like darkening watercolours.   
screaming is what melds like electricity into his veins, weaves into his soul with jagged, zig-zagging stitches, makes his eardrums sting and mouth burn as he sits up sharply in bed, eyes wide with fear and uncertainty. screaming is what seems to be the soundtrack, the one constant crescendo of his entire life, fracturing his every night and ringing in his ears long after being embraced by quiescence.  
  
screaming is also bad, very bad, because now gone are his dreams of stars and molten silver and celeste gold, and gone are his dreams of a certain orange-haired boy with twinkling irises and a radiant smile and lustrous hands; and it's cold. it's cold and bitter and wintry in his room, absinthian oblivion, and it's cold; and all of a sudden kageyama feels the familiar feeling of despair lacing through his bones, through his spine, down through his ribs, and he wants nothing more than to not exist. the screaming continues, penetrating through the unpunctuated silence, a razor-blade hyphen hesitantly permeating a still unfinished sentence. and it's cold.

night has swallowed kageyama up, and when he glances fervently around at his ambience, all he's able to pick up on is darkness. only the bloodless moonlight manages to filter dimly through his curtains, and casts a harsh illume over his thin, curled-up figure, all wrapped up in a paper-white quilt like a funeral; and the alarm clock on his bedside table reads  _2:01am_  in foreboding crimson letters, sanguine, dangerous, dripping garnet-red.  
  
suddenly, the screaming stops for one heavenly minute, and all is still for a moment. then there's another shattering screech, another shrill slap, another slam of the door as glass showers down in splinters and heartlines are smashed into a thousand pieces in kageyama's household.  
  
he can hear darkness too, now, can feel it piercing painfully into his skin as his parents go at it again. and it's calamity, chaos, a cataclysm in his soul, as he listens to the deafening yells of his mother deep in the night- "you go to  _hell,_  bastard, and take that fucking tobio with you while you're at it-" "yeah, and how about you fucking  _shut up_  and take care of your son yourself? i don't want him anymore, you dirty whore-" " _fuck_  no, i want all the trash out of my house, not just one person-" and on, and on, and on and on and  _on_ , and it's truly a catastrophe, and he sits up, a travesty.

on and on and on they argue, shouting about what a failure their relationship is, what a failure their life is, what a failure their  _son_  is, and it makes kageyama feel dizzy, crushed vertigo racing through his veins and swelling through his body. he's just woken up but already his heart is destructive, pounding hard, so goddamn hard in his chest; hammering relentlessly against the jail bars of his ribcage, begging and sobbing and aching to get out, out,  _out_  of the airless prison it’s been sentenced to, and he can't swallow the lump that's starting to form in his throat, stabbing at his neck. and it's pathetic, isn't it? it's so goddamn  _pathetic_ , the way he's too weak to handle the cruel words of his own parents,  _pathetic_.  
  
it hurts, though, it really, really does hurt, and kageyama doesn’t know what to do. he doesn't know whether to turn around and face it headfirst, or to get dragged away by the avalanche with his back turned to the tragic disaster. it's kind of overwhelming, really, this heaviness he feels in his bones almost daily, and he's  _sick_  of it- so completely, utterly sick of it- and that's when his mother crashes in, the atmosphere suddenly perforated with tear-stained cheeks and blazing lineaments and mussed-up black hair mirroring his own.  
  
when she grabs him roughly by the shoulders, it seems like the world is distorting and crumbling to pieces around him, all crackling static and endless buzzing and reverberating drones. she shouts at him with no signs of stopping, scolding him with a little too many curse words, and her fists are clenched angrily whilst her eyes spit scorching flames into his hunched-up, ever-shrinking figure.   
her face is ugly and monstrous and twisted beyond recognition, and kageyama can't see his mother properly anymore, but there is one thing he can comprehend in the grandiose complexities of things: the terrible, terrible abuse she's spitting out, drenched in fury and furore and all-out  _madness_ , is completely directed towards him.  _him_. her son.  
  
_disappointment, failure, good-for-nothing._

they're just  _some_  of the words ringing endlessly in kageyama's ears, ricocheting off of the cracked, pitiful walls of his brain, consuming him and overtaking him and drowning him in a surging tidal wave of raw and bitter reality. it's hard enough for him already to accept the truth about things, that the world is corrupt and  _he_  is corrupt and no one will ever be able to love him- and yet, it doesn't help that his mother is shrieking at him what his brain already chants menacingly on a daily basis.   
  
_disappointment, failure, good-for-nothing._  
  
his every inhale is shaky, every exhale sealed with regret and self-hatred and disgust at his own self, and kageyama is a mess. a mess. there's nothing he can do.   
the insults echo inside his empty shell of a body, and now he's trembling uncontrollably, and he feels dizzy again from all too much and all too less thinking. crystal-glaze tears are spilling out of his eyes so, so, fast, as though they are a deluge, a flood waiting to cause devastation, and his breathing is a little too fast, a little too erratic, a little too high-paced and irregular, and he's forgotten what oxygen is, and-  _fuck_ \- how do you inhale, now? how do you  _inhale_?  
  
and he forgets how to live, too, forgets how to live when he hears an anguished intake of air and feels a sudden scathing burn on his cheek, feels his face spark and ignite with a searing spectrum of  _pain_ , feels the furious gaze of his mother dig into him as she raises her hand and yells savagely.  
as he cries and cries and cries and  _cries_ , he admits it to himself. he truly is a mess, a fucking mess, and  _yes_ , there is nothing he can do. he cradles his slapped cheek like a baby, tears slipping down his face in the same path they had years ago when he had scuffed his knees or broken a toy as a child.  _oh, nostalgia._  this time, though, he's the one who's been broken.

after, despite the scarily unalleviated panic coursing through his veins, kageyama manages to unfurl his eyelids and watch helplessly as his mother exits the room, finally finished with her own crying. " _get rid of these fucking volleyballs_." she hisses as a parting greeting, and she spits on the floor and tears holes in the vicinity with her kerosene-sharp presence, and then- she's disappeared, disappeared behind the door frame, disappeared as if she'd never even existed, as if she'd never even tormented kageyama to the point of madness.  
  
and then all of a sudden there's panic, panic,  _panic_ , and kageyama's frozen, body numb and paralysed and torpid, and he tries his hardest to swim through the pool of bittersweet rusted blood clouding his mind; and there's an acrid taste in his mouth and alkaline grief settling over his visage, and what now? what now? he can't steady his breathing, he just  _can't_ , and sour, body-wracking gasps take him over as he twists into a fetus on his bed. dulcet despair wraps around his limbs, almost like a burial veil. he doesn't feel any emotion as strongly as he should, but even so, they strike him down and reduce him to this wreck, like his mother does every. single. goddamn. night.  _ha_.  
  
it's a while before he can even slightly gain control of his senses, and by then he's all nimble goosebumps and clammy hands, body already too far gone and shrouded in ennui and misery. with a shaky gulp and melancholy eyes, he slowly cloaks himself with the night time air rather than his blanket, and reaches for his phone in the blackness encompassing him with trembling hands and a trembling heart.  
  
one ring, two rings, three rings, and the person kageyama's calling picks up in a flurry, sleepiness and exhaustion woven into the spaces of their bated breath. "okay?" they prompt immediately, soothingly, voice hoarse with quick-fading memories of dreams and nightmares long since abandoned; and they are drifting away, a lone speck of dust in a hurricane, one that doesn't bring havoc and destruction like  _he_  always does.

a second passes, and kageyama can't believe how steadily the other person has answered to a call when it's so late. "hey, you okay?" they repeat, their voice more even this time, and that's when he's set off at last, a bomb finally detonating.  
and devastatingly.   
"help," is all he can physically muster,  _pathetic_ (disappointment, failure,  _good-for-nothing_ ) and, and then; he's gone again, swept under by a pulverising tide of remorseless repose, and everything hurts as he sobs down the phone to the other person, sobs for what's happened and what is happening and how goddamn hopeless and powerless and fucking  _weak_  he knows he is.  
it hasn't even been a minute of crying before the other person speaks one word- " _playground_ "- and hangs up the phone, leaving kageyama alone. the vehement  _beep_  of the phone stretches into infinity.   
  
he wonders why his life is a symphony of screams and sempiternal beeps, an orchestra of pain and deafeningly silent voicemails. what has he ever done to deserve this?  
he wonders why.  
  
**ii.**  
  
it's two thirty by the time kageyama reaches where he wants to be, two thirty by the time his panic has momentarily lulled into a soothing, sea-soft calm, gentle and euphonious as early birdsong. he can only slightly remember his getting here, after he'd stopped crying- he'd forced himself to  _move move move_  at last, and had tripped over the volleyballs littering his bedroom floor as he fled, falling flat on his face and grazing his eyebrow slightly. it had stung, but the sting of the cut hadn't hurt nearly as much as his mother's words.  
  
he'd known that what he needed was to get out, out,  _out_  and away from the poison of his home, but the rustling movements of his parents in the landing outside had stopped him from vanishing via the front door. he'd crept to his bedroom window and slid it open, instead, taking in the fragile zephyr all around him softly, before leaping out into the air.   
  
it's not something kageyama's experienced in, exactly, jumping out of windows at ungodly hours of the morning- he's sensible, introverted, doesn't take many risks- but his garden has a little, run-down shed directly underneath his bedroom, and so it had only been common sense to latch onto its side before stealthily dropping to the concrete-sprinkled asphalt beneath. it had seemingly taken an aeviternity to do so, and in the process, he had made one deadly mistake of scraping his knees, reminding him of his lonely childhood. from then on, however, his escape had been simple; he'd only had to swing his long (scraped-up) legs over the brittle garden fence to get out, and that was it: he was free, free as a bird, free of that goddamn cage of both emotional and physical abuse.  _free._  
  
now, though, kageyama isn't too focused on his freedom and liberty and almost perfectly executed plan. his arms tighten around his ribs as he slowly walks, pants mingling like cloud condensation in the frigid milieu and tear drops frozen in the moonlight; and, it's cold, it's so goddamn cold outside. clearly, his soul and bedroom and mother's icy remarks aren't the only things that worship arctic temperatures, because apparently night-time japan does, too. it sucks, kind of. he wishes he'd brought a coat.  
  
when he wanders into the abandoned, derelict playground, all tarnished slides and creaky swings and phantom laughter of long-gone children, he exhales in one lingering, drawn-out breath he didn't know he had been holding, a hazy sigh heavy enough to fill the lungs of thousands of corpses. it's completely tranquil here, peaceful enough to soothe the seemingly everlasting thud of his heart so ubiquitous when in his house; and with his bruised shoes, he traces the invisible footsteps of the boy who'd arrived at this park moments before he did, the ghostly tracks leading down to a stock-still swing in the middle of the grass. with his bruised shoes, he follows the path lying in front of him like a protracted ellipsis heading nowhere into the world, intangible, incandescent; and then he reaches the swing, draped completely in crepuscule and shadows, where one lone splatter of colour slashes at the dark. like goldfish, like monarch butterflies, like stray tabby cats, like blazing marigolds in the summer, there is a small head of orange hair lying back on the basket swing. the body connected to it is curled up, resembling the fleeting flame of a candle, and the wind ruffles his fringe.

"hello, hinata." kageyama says.   
the archaic, arching trees above them rustle in the slight, dusky breeze as he folds his legs and settles in the basket swing himself, too long and too lanky for the makeshift bed, but limbs perfectly interlacing with the other boy's. kageyama feels the coldness that had enveloped his sense of self slowly melt away as the other boy nuzzles into him fiercely, resting his head on the crook of his neck, essentially wrapping him up in a hug; and he hates the proximity, recalls how his mother likes getting this close in order to hurt him, and quivers slightly. it doesn't go unnoticed.  
"it’s okay, kageyama, i'm not going to do anything." hinata murmurs softly, a world away from the enthusiastic exterior he exhibits during the daytime, and tentatively reaches out to hold the setter's hand. his palms are warm, sweet, smooth, the sort of gentleness that comforts kageyama almost instantly, and slowly, his thundering heart calms. he's grateful.

he's always been terrible with words, with comprehending things himself and explaining things to his parents, with apologising to those he's hurt and complimenting those he admires, and that's why when he speaks, he speaks only briefly.  
"thanks, dumbass." he says.  _i love you, and thank you for consoling me in the middle of a cold playground at two 'o' clock, dumbass_ , he means.  
hinata bubbles with contentment, looking up to offer the other a silvery, astral smile, laced with the very essence of bright starshine. "it’s fine, as long as  _you're_  fine." he laughs, and it sounds like flowers in bloom, like the sun blossoming every dawn.  
he squeezes kageyama's hand, softly and gingerly, and snuggles further into him.  
_what actually happened tonight, though?_  
"tonight it was... it was the usual, y'know? arguing, and all that." he manages to stutter out, feeling hinata's body tense and jaw tighten.  _my parents just decided to hammer at each other before hurting me with their fingers and their words, is all. oh, and i had a small panic attack. it's nothing too serious._  
  
strangely, kageyama may not have said anything out loud, but hinata understands. he always understands. it's sort of an unspoken-  _literally_  unspoken- thing between them, to converse with each other's clandestine eyes and to tell stories in the form of languishing exhalations;to love using their bare hands and fight in the midst of a dragging silence. they don't need to tell each other anything because, somehow, they already  _know;_  they can read it in the crinkles of each other's clothes and in the depths of their smiles, and they can press memories into each other's minds without opening their lips or uttering a single word. it's woven into the way they disagree and quarrel about the teeniest of things, how they compete readily with everything they do, how they sometimes retreat from the whole  _i hate you_  façade and hold each other delicately like this, fitting together seamlessly like a jigsaw. 

it's because of this connection they have, this unspoken agreement, that hinata knows just what to do, just what to say in this situation. he lets go, abruptly, of kageyama's hand, only to bring it up to the black-haired boy's face, petite hands delicate and almost ghostly in the darkness. from this movement, kageyama flinches away all at once, afraid that the hand reaching towards him is there to slap him, punch him, damage him in one way or another- but then everything is gentle, fluttering, ephemeral, and hinata is lightly tracing the outline of kageyama's features with a smile playing at his lips.

"bet they told you how terrible you are, right?" he guesses, and for a moment kageyama hates this fiery-haired boy, this so utterly beautiful decoy, simply for instantly  _knowing_  everything about him. it's maddening, but sometimes it can be an immense comfort- it gets agonising, really, to hold everything in, to pretend all is okay.

hinata's fingers brush past his eyelashes, long and dark and wet from tears, and dip down to caress his cheekbones, his nose, his chapped lips. "they’re absolutely wrong, in that case, no offence." he continues. "you're entrancing, enthralling, enrapturing. i don't understand why people wouldn't admire you, let alone dislike you."  
kageyama doesn't believe him, but hinata is unrelenting.  _he's as passionate to make me smile as my mother is to make me suffer_ , he thinks.  _that's scary._  
instead of voicing his innermost thoughts, however, he settles for pinching hinata's arm. "idiot, did you use a thesaurus to come up with all those words?" he teases, somewhat flattered at all the  _e_ words his counterpart has managed to come up with in such a short space of time.  
"maybe," hinata chuckles in response. "although even a thesaurus wouldn't contain enough words to describe how amazing you are."  
  
suddenly, kageyama tears his gaze away from the bundle of sunshine in his arms, heat engulfing his body and staining his cheeks rhyolite-pink. he's embarrassed as all hell-  _why does hinata say the_   _cheesiest things_?- but as of now, the incidents from before have been erased from his mind, replaced by the image of hinata and hinata only- all tangled, bittersweet hair and gleaming, mischievous eyes and lips bitten raw, curving into the most radiant of smiles. his words, too, are wonderful, his stupid, stupid words forming corny, uplifting statements and terribly-put insults and stuttered confessions; but kageyama loves it, he really, really does.  
  
for all his messy thoughts and pulsating feelings, though, he's still unable to articulate his gratitude, his care, his pure and unadulterated  _love_  for the overexcited spiker. therefore, after a second of careful deliberation and a dramatic internal monologue, kageyama can only settle for uttering three simple, simple words- " _thank you, stupid_ "- hoping desperately to the gods above that hinata will understand.  
  
he does. "i love you, kageyama," he says after a while, placing one small hand over the other's chest and feeling the steady  _beat beat beat_  of his heart intimately, "-and i'm super duper glad that you're calmer, now."  
"mmm," is what kageyama hums contentedly in response. "mmm, i... i love you, too. dumbass."  
  
and then he sleeps, drifts off right in the middle of a playground with hinata all wrapped up in his arms; but this time, there is no screaming to choke him awake, only the light, austere breathing of the boy next to him. and as he sleeps, he dreams of him, too, realising that home is not in the cruel and cold house he lives in, but rather in a pair of warm, honey-like brown eyes and a sunlit smile.

 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading (≧∀≦)  
> if you can leave feedback or even a small comment i'd highly appreciate it; i'm always trying to improve and they are v encouraging!  
> have a nice day : )


End file.
